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Re: trademark policy draft



On Wed, Aug 01, 2012 at 10:41:31AM -0400, Joey Hess wrote:
> Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:
> > \item You can use DEBIAN trademarks to make true factual statements about
> >   DEBIAN or communicate compatibility with your product truthfully.
> 
> Can I use DEBIAN trademarks to make snarky ill-supported statements?
> (Anticipating a decrease in list traffic.)

(Fearing an increase in nitpicking threshold.) Well, you can, people
will, and I'm sure nobody will bother, on average. But I can imagine all
sorts of "journalistic" declarations about Debian that would undermine
the project reputation. If they are factual (or non-disprovable) fine,
if not this gives the project a edge to defend its reputation/identity.
This is what trademarks are about.

> > \item You cannot use DEBIAN trademarks in a domain name, with or without
> >   commercial intent.
> So debian.mirror.my.org is illegal?

I've been correct by Mako on this before. Short answer: hostname !=
domain name, so "debian.mirror.my.org" is perfectly fine.  (No, I don't
have a clear definition for "domain name" to offer, but it is intended
here as "the things that you register via a domain name registrar".)

For the record, this provision is already present in our _current_
trademark policy, quoting: « we insist that no business use the name
‘Debian’ in the name of […] a domain name ».

Cheers.
-- 
Stefano Zacchiroli     zack@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} . o .
Maître de conférences   ......   http://upsilon.cc/zack   ......   . . o
Debian Project Leader    .......   @zack on identi.ca   .......    o o o
« the first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club »

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